Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 897: Tear in Reality

The examiner had no composure left.

Obligation held the last pieces together. That, and the fact that nearly every eye in the room was still pointed at her.

”Whenever you’re ready.”

Kaiden pushed off the wall and crossed to the pedestal.

The room changed before he touched anything.

The girls’ tests had been spectacular in ways the human brain could understand.

Space had bent. Storms had howled. Moonlight had formed blades. Dominion had cracked the floor, Carnage had steamed, Light had burned gold, and Hearth had made hardened officials remember what home felt like.

Every one of those readings had been loud.

Yet a quiet settled around Kaiden before his palm even touched the orb.

The technicians slowed at their consoles without deciding to. Grace’s fingers went still on her tablet. The officials near the far wall shifted back a step, then looked down at their own feet because none of them remembered moving.

Vespera watched from behind the formation, her face unreadable.

Kaiden placed his palm on the artifact.

PARAGON OF SIN.

The words formed in the crystalline depths, clean and familiar.

It was the same class that read as F-tier merely a few months ago.

A faint glow appeared, identical to the first pulse of every test before it, and the lead examiner’s hand hovered over her console in the exhausted hope that the artifact would finally produce an output that fit the manual.

The screen stayed empty for one second.

Two.

Then words wrote themselves across the glass.

[SOURCE TRACE ACCEPTED.]

The lead examiner screamed. She’d known what Source Trace meant since the first briefing that told her never to use it.

”Cancel it!” she shouted, both hands flying over keys that no longer answered her. ”Source Trace is a sealed protocol because we don’t fully understand it! Who authorized it? Who touched my console?!”

The artifact used to examine the tier of an awakened combatant came from the dungeons. While humans with the technical know-how could interact with it, build on top of it, or change some of its behavior, they were still using the same artifact core they brought back from the dungeons.

”Nobody!” a younger technician cried. ”I didn’t touch anything!”

The glow sank into itself.

Color drained from the orb until the crystal stopped shining outward and began casting shadow.

Darkness spread across the pedestal in slow veins, crawling over metal, tile, boots, cables, and the examiner’s white-knuckled hands while the classification needle did not climb.

It bent backward.

The reinforced glass over the lead console cracked with a soft, obscene pop.

Every monitor in the room took the next line at once.

[RESPONSE DETECTED.]

”Response from what?!” the younger technician shrieked. ”To what?! It’s doing things on its own!”

”Cut the feed!” Grace ordered.

”I can’t!” another technician shouted from a station that was spitting sparks into his lap. ”It’s not going out through our relay anymore! The stream is hijacked!”

The containment artifacts began to scream.

Alarms had rhythm, sequence, human design. This was mana being forced through wards too quickly, a high, metal-on-bone wail that made the guards flinch and made the officials clap hands over their ears.

The orb split from the inside, parting.

A black line cut down its center, thin as a hair at first, then widening into a vertical slit. No shards fell. No fragments broke loose.

”I-Is that an opening like a dungeon gate?!” a technician shouted.

The temperature dropped in a way the body understood before the mind could measure it.

Skin tightened. Teeth ached. The guards at the perimeter kept their stances because training held, but their weapons came up.

”Ma’am!” one of the awakened guards barked, sword already rising toward the pedestal. ”Permission to destroy the artifact!”

Grace’s tablet slipped to the ground.

She was about to grant it.

Then she saw Kaiden.

The anomaly was grinning.

Every trace of camera charm had burned off his face. The handsome, lazy arrogance he wore for crowds had split into a madman’s grin.

Red burned under his skin first, climbing through his veins in molten lines before purple drove it out, orange swallowed that, and a deep, obscene pink pulsed once from his sternum with enough warmth to make the air shudder.

Deep indigo crept in after the pink, slow and thick. A cold, starving gold drove it out, pulling at the edges of every surface it touched and leaving the space around Kaiden thinner.

Then green, vivid and venomous.

Each flash replaced the last before it could settle. The sequence moved too quickly to be a rainbow, but human eyes made it one anyway, seven sins cascading through him in a tearing rhythm that turned the quiet around him into worshipful pressure.

Grace looked past him, and the women behind Kaiden were smiling.

Luna, Nyx, Calypso, Bastet, Aria, and Alice wore different shapes of the same deranged joy, all teeth and shining eyes and absolute refusal to fear whatever was happening in front of them.

Even Vespera wore it. She couldn’t stop it, that terrible pride, the kind that made everything else on her face irrelevant.

Only Alexandra looked confused. Terrified too, because she was not an idiot and the room felt like the first second of the end of the world. But Nyx had one of her hands, Alice had the other, and Alexandra held on while she forced herself not to step back.

That was the worst answer Grace could have received.

Either Kaiden Grey’s entire inner circle had gone insane at the same time, save for the blonde, or they understood enough to know the artifact was not about to implode on them.

”Hold,” Grace said, swallowing the order that would have turned the room into a battlefield. ”Nobody does anything unless I say.”

The awakened guard kept his weapon raised, but he held back from lunging.

The stream stopped being only a stream.

For one second, every angle in the testing room still showed Kaiden with his palm on the orb.

Then the image bent inward.

The same black sky appeared on awakened interfaces, phones, tablets, military feeds, scrying mirrors, guild projectors, airplane windows, puddles, office glass, and every polished artifact surface still holding enough mana to reflect the world.

Then people looked up.

The sky had changed.

Daylight dimmed across half the planet.

On the night side, stars began going out in a spreading circle, each point disappearing as a body vast enough to cover Earth moved between humanity and the rest of the universe.

Tokyo saw it above the towers. Cairo saw it above the desert haze. Johannesburg saw it over streets where people had been watching the reassessment on their phones. Fishing boats in the Pacific saw the same thing as pilots above the Atlantic, and every one of them understood the same impossible fact at the same time.

Distance had stopped protecting them.

A seven-armed titan stood beyond the world.

The titan occupied every sky at once, too large for horizon, curvature, daylight, weather, or sanity to limit.

Its arms spread behind the planet like black continents that had learned to move, and wherever one of those hands passed, stars vanished behind its fingers in clean, silent lines.

Then it leaned forward.